They Don't Need to Listen
On a cool fall afternoon in 1999, Amy Boyer walked to her car after work, but was gunned down by a former classmate who had been stalking her for years. Liam Youens had used the 'background checking' service, Docusearch, to find her address and place of employment. He watched the dental office she worked at for days to figure out her schedule, before finally shooting her and then turning the gun on himself. It cost him $45.
In the past two and half decades the ease and breadth of information available online has only increased. We have companies like Ovia Health selling health data to employers that partner with them, like Activision Blizzard. Facebook gave police private chat data from a Nebraska mother and daughter in 2022 that indicated the seventeen year old daughter had taken abortion pills after 20 weeks, both mother and daughter plead guilty to abortion related charges. Of course there is the infamous incident where Target had figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, exposing her condition to him via coupons.
These are not isolated incidents, this is the world we live in. We have an entire shadow economy where data is the most valuable resource, and anyone can access it for just a few bucks. Each time we trade convenience for privacy, we put information out there for others to exploit and it comes at a real cost. None of this is inevitable, we have the tools at our disposal to prevent it, but we have to change our habits.
I think most of us are vaguely aware that data brokers are out there selling our data to anyone who will pay. What most don't understand is how seemingly insignificant information can be used to build a comprehensive dossier of our lives. Most of the data available is nominally de-identified, but it can be aggregated to provide a disturbingly detailed picture of someone's life, this is even true of people who think they remain fairly anonymous.
In 2014 a FoI request resulted in 173,000,000 taxi trips becoming public information. It was believed that it had been anonymized, but it was quickly discovered that the formatting on taxi medallions and license numbers allowed them to be reverse engineered. This meant individual drivers could be matched to individual cars with just a bit of math. Another person took this and cross referenced it with public images of celebrities getting into cabs with visible plates, and was able to figure out if they tipped and how much. This was then expanded to determine the home addresses of people who visited Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. If we can find people going to a strip club, we can find people going to abortion clinics.
This was from information just available on the internet and provided by the government. Anyone with the time and will could have done the same thing, and none of this required a single law to be broken. It cost whatever the fee for the FoI was plus the internet bill.
This isn't the only time something like this has happened. Netflix data has been linked to IMDb profiles, AOL search queries were linked to public records, and MIT and Harvard identified people within an anonymous genetic dataset using public genealogy databases. Each of these examples occurred from basic information that can be gathered online.
None of this information needs to be out there, but there will be a cost for anonymity. For most people the cost will be small, just giving up some convenience. The first things I suggest are switching to a privacy browser and avoiding products from big tech companies.
A privacy browser is a trivial swap these days, you can easily import bookmarks, passwords, etc to and from all major browsers. Chrome and Edge are literal spyware at this point, instead try Firefox for a baseline, you will keep most of the features you had, but it isn't spying on you. If you want to go a step further you can try Brave, which incidentally has a pretty great search engine with a focus on privacy and their own index (so they do not rely on Bing or Google).
[Edit: I love Brave, not because it is maximally private and secure, but because it gives the best privacy and security out of the box without compromising on features. If you aren't actively committing crimes, it is good enough, while never feeling restrictive. Tor or a hardened Firefox browser will be better for actually locking down your data, but if you need those, this isn't the post for you.]
Avoiding Google, Meta, and Microsoft products is harder, but it is worth it. People often think that their phone is listening to them, and it is, just not in the way they typically imagine it. They don't actually need to use the microphone on your device, they already know what you searched for, when you got paid, how much you make, where you are at all times, and what your interests are. Google and Microsoft both read your emails, both track what you search for in their search engines, and depending on your phone and the apps on it, they know where you are and where you have been. Meta has arguably even more invasive methods given that they know where you live, who your friends are, how you react to various things, and so forth.
Signal attempted to run an ad campaign that highlighted this by creating ads that showed what factors caused an individual to be targeted. This campaign had ads as specific as "You go this ad because you're a newlywed pilates instructor and you're cartoon crazy. This ad used your location to see you you're in La Jolla. You're into parenting blogs and thinking about LGBTQ adoption." As we have seen already, far less information than this is required to cause real harm, and Meta collects far more data than that. Do you really trust them with yours?
There are alternative social media sites that are less horrible, but social media itself is part of the problem. Even if you use something like Mastodon or Bluesky, you need to be careful about what you tell the world. At the end of the day, no amount of precautions will help if you dox yourself. Still, you can take steps to operate a pseudonymous account on many platforms, as long as you aren't the product being sold (if they sell ads, you are the product).
You can use a privacy forward email provider (Proton is a good option), use privacy browsers instead of the app, and a virtual private network (VPN) to mask a lot of the information you leak. If you have an Android phone you can switch to GrapheneOS or CalyxOS. Apple, for all of their flaws, is comparatively private, though you are heavily limited on how private you can be. You can turn your device off when you aren't using it, or place it inside of a faraday bag to block all signals in and out. Unfortunately, you will have to make sacrifices to get this far. I think it is worth it, particularly in our political environment, but any steps you take help to one degree or another.
[Link to technical post]
So far I have focused almost entirely on how the data economy can harm us as individuals, but there is a bigger threat. This environment of surveillance and data production leads to some very dark outcomes for society as a whole. Ragebait is profitable because it gets engagement, this polarizes the political landscape. Highly emotional responses increase click-through rates and message diffusion. We are starting to see technofeudalism as the norm, where we own nothing and have little agency in how we interact online. Terms of service contracts shift constantly and are intentionally difficult to read and understand. Our lexicons shift to avoid words that community guidelines punish such as unalive instead of kill. The information presented to us is tailored to keep us siloed, and this is impacting children in frightening ways. Do we really want YouTube feeding our sons manosphere content? It also contributes to the enshittification of the internet, where creators can't make the content they want to because they have to play the algorithm's game.
Orwell imagined a dystopia in 1984, but we have created something even worse. Our world is even more opaque, the levers of control are hidden behind shiny buttons and dopamine hits. We didn't even need this to be mandated, we bugged our own homes. All of this makes us less safe at all levels, from individuals who want to do us harm, to multinational corporations raising prices if they think we can afford it, to the government arresting teenage girls. In 1999 it cost $45 to dox a person, now we give it away for free. We know what we are paying with, but the price seems a bit steep to me.